Python boss Guido van Rossum steps down after 30 years

Guido van Rossum, known as ‘Benevolent Dictator For Life’ until now, has decided that after 30 years, he doesn’t want to think as hard about his creation and is switching to being an “ordinary core developer”.

“I don’t ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP (basically a proposal for a code change) and find that so many people despise (sic) my decisions.” he wrote, adding that the issue was also in part medical – he didn’t give details but said he felt it was time for a “permanent vacation” from the trials of leadership.

Rossum has confirmed he won’t be involved in appointing his replacement. In fact, it sounds very much like he doesn’t think there should be one.

“So what are you all going to do? Create a democracy? Anarchy? A dictatorship? A federation?” he quipped.

“I’m not worried about the day to day decisions in the issue tracker or on GitHub. Very rarely I get asked for an opinion, and usually, it’s not actually important. So this can just be dealt with as it has always been.”

He lays out a list of things that the users will need to consider going forwards like who has banning rights and who inducts noobs to the core developer team, but its laid out in a context of ‘do what you want but keep me out of it’.

“I’ll still be here, but I’m trying to let you all figure something out for yourselves. I’m tired, and need a very long break.”

So what happens now? Well, when you’ve got a 30-year-old language, enough time has passed that the next stage will write itself to a degree, but Rossum has made it a little easier by running through all of the eventualities he could think of, which can only help – but it also serves as a reminder that this is no longer his problem.

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